Start Providing SEO as a service

In this week’s Office Hours we talk about providing SEO as a service and where you should begin.

In order to provide SEO to clients, be sure you start with setting up tracking. I’m not just talking about setting up Google Analytics (although that’s where you should start) but also setup conversion tracking, a dashboard, and then monthly reports.

Transcript:

Yeah, but you said something in there that really was very, very important. I think will help you no matter what you provide your Is, which is about reporting. Yeah. And the foundation of the plan that I’m providing starts with analytics and Reporting because we need to know what we’re doing. And we need to take it out of the realm of feelings and subjective for our clients and put it in the realm of this is concretely. What you received? In in for every client that you have to set them up in Google analytics and set them up with Goal conversions and Google analytics that will help you no matter what services you’re providing them later. So, I even this, I had a tough call with a client maybe a month ago and they’re like It’s not working doesn’t work. Right? And I’m like, okay why do you say that? Well, no one would ever contact us to use our services online. Okay. Well, why are you why are you doing this then? Right. But, but look, this many people contacted you last month, presumably because they want you service, right? And so, we were able to Pivot the conversation to what does the website accomplish? Not does my website look good. Yeah. Frank, you know, right? It’s more concrete. So because we had the data accumulating. Yeah. Even though they weren’t ready to ask for it yet, we were able to say okay and we pivoted the whole conversation to this is what you’re getting and that just saves so many troubles. Number one, You’re providing a better service for a client because now your clients are getting something and they’re not just your not just an expense, your something that’s giving them something. So then to, when they, when they say, well, I’m going to write this check to Tim every, you know, month or however often you charge people. Now it’s something that’s giving them something not just another expense. So, as much as you could do to push people towards, this is the number of Of. Leads, we gave you. This is the number of sales, your website generated. This is where those leads and sales came from the more you’re able to do that from day one. The better you’re able to set yourself up for success with your clients, right? So that’s why Step 1 and 2 is always set up, analytics set up goals for Analytics. And I just can’t reiterate enough. How valuable? That will be in a future even if clients don’t care right now. Yeah, right. It’s it’s it’s you’re doing them a service.

So so the question for you to him is have you set up analytics for all of your clients yet? Yeah. And that’s always been a base practice of mine with building websites. That’s number. one thing I really look for one of the number one things to look for during The scope analysis and everything just to see if they have those Baseline metrics to begin with and so I’ve done that quite a bit. And the one thing I haven’t done I did for one client with the help of Google ads a couple years ago was setting up goals. So that was I’ve watched your video on that and went through and set up goals for my business so I Step through that process once already again. So yeah, I can do that for a couple of others, just as practice and that’s really great. I think what you’ll find two is that’s the get that’s the real next step towards providing value. Yeah. Because like like that problem I have with my client if I like it’s a is we got on traffic then that client would have just canceled right there and said yeah big butt because I could say people contacted you A significant number of people. And that led to a conversation where it’s like, well who’s even receiving these contacts and no one knew who is getting the form. Right. It was actually done that with a client of mine too. You know it’s going to junk. Nobody was checking it. Listen leads. Yeah. Suddenly now that someone’s paying attention to the leads there I’m instantly providing value regardless of whether it’s SEO success. Or whatever. But now someone’s actually looking at the leads and over the last month, like they keep sending me. Wow, this is a great lead. Wow, this is a great lead. They’ve done even looking at him for six months. Yeah. And before that probably more so like instantly they’re making money. And so next time, when I write, when I send them a bill, they’re going to remember. Oh wow. Look at how many customers we got over the last month. Yeah, this is essential to my business. Exactly. This is not Not another expense like web hosting, this is.

So the next step after setting up analytics on your side’s and setting up goals on tho your site’s is this dashboard thing. And this dashboard Patricia wanted to ask about it today. But so I might wait till she gets back off of her thing, but the dashboard is designed to be something. You receive. Not necessarily your clients receive every week to help you quickly identify if the something is going wrong. and, I don’t know how many times it saved my bacon. like I even last week I confessed to the group that holy crap one of my clients lost all their tracking All of it. And if I’m trying to justify their expense to me because I can prove how much they’re getting out of it and I have no tracking. Oh crap, that’s a drop, everything and fixed moment, right? Right and well we figured it out, figured it out. Exactly. And we were able to fix it but the otherwise I would have waited till I did my monthly reporting the next month and it would have been weeks and weeks of no data, you know, or things like that. So that dashboard is a real bacon saver. I’ve identifying oh shit moments that you have to address? but I want to get into that, a little bit, specific way to cure she returns and then and This is the fourth, step then becomes. Preparing a monthly report for all of your clients and that I used, I’ve met my first marketing agency. My boss used to say that is what the clients are paying us for and I hear it was so important for him to that we every month issued a report was written into our contract. We had to give it to the client every month, and that’s because number one, it always puts the clients, Focus. What we’re getting for it. But two, it allows you to preemptively get to problems that might occur in. So, this problem with the, with the client thinking that no clients were, nobody was contacting them from. The website came out of a monthly report meeting. Had I not had that meeting and had a monthly report prepared for them, they just would have canceled and I wouldn’t have known why, right? They would have assumed nothing is happening but because I had that much so that monthly herbal so like The more it reporting you setup. Earlier and get them used to it, even if they never look at it eventually they might look and then you can start asking questions and answering questions and that just got to save save your lie. I can’t reiterate enough how viable these reports our client client retention and the more you put into them and the more we look at them the better it’s going to be for them.